FAA Expected to Certify Boeing 737 MAX 10 on Tuesday, Ending Years of Delay
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is expected to announce FAA approval of Boeing's largest 737 variant during a visit to the company's Everett, Washington, factory, according to Reuters.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is expected to announce on Tuesday that the Federal Aviation Administration has certified the Boeing 737 MAX 10, according to sources briefed on the plans who spoke to Reuters.
Duffy is set to make the announcement during a visit to Boeing’s factory in Everett, Washington, touting the certification of the long-delayed larger variant of the company’s best-selling airplane, the sources said. Boeing referred questions to the FAA, which did not immediately comment.
Certification has been a long time coming. Boeing originally planned to begin delivering the MAX 10 in 2020, but the aircraft became stuck in a stricter approval process that followed two fatal crashes of the smaller MAX 8 in 2018 and 2019 and a midair cabin panel blowout on a nearly new Alaska Airlines MAX 9 in January 2024.
On Friday, the FAA’s Type Certification Board, made up of agency management, completed a review that is the final step before a certification decision, Reuters reported.
The approval matters for Boeing’s order book. Airlines have ordered nearly 1,500 MAX 10s, accounting for about 30 percent of Boeing’s outstanding 737 backlog, and the company has already built a handful of the planes that are awaiting delivery. Major customers include United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Ryanair, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines.
Delays piled up along the way
Even after the crash-related scrutiny, technical problems kept pushing the timeline back. A problem with the anti-ice system on 737 MAX engines that surfaced in 2023 further delayed certification of the MAX 10 and the smaller MAX 7. In late September, Boeing disclosed a glitch in the latest update of the 737 MAX navigation software that threatened another delay; the FAA determined it was not a safety concern and did not require a fix as a condition of certification.
The MAX 7, the smaller of the two delayed variants, won FAA approval in August after more than eight years of review. Last week, Duffy met with the chief executives of Boeing, RTX, Honeywell, GE Aerospace, Textron and Gulfstream in Georgia to discuss how the certification process can be improved.
Boeing still has one more major certification ahead of it: the 777-9, the largest jetliner the company has in production, is six years behind schedule, with the company saying it expects to finish certification and begin deliveries in 2027.
Reporting based on coverage by Reuters.
